ROCKY MOUNT — Buster Williams doesn’t just believe in ghosts, he goes out looking for them.
During a visit to High Street Cemetery on Tuesday, he and fellow investigator Robin Donahue called out to a spirit as if it were a friend they were trying to coax out of hiding.
“We’re picking up some of your energy,” Williams said. “Don’t be afraid of us.”
Although their instruments detected some possible activity, they got no response that day. But on others, they have.
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Williams and Donahue are paranormal investigators, or what some might call ghost hunters. And this month, they’re inviting the public to tag along on their investigations.
Williams is the founder of Franklin County VA Paranormal. This Friday and next, the group is hosting ghost walks in downtown Rocky Mount, which will include stories of ghost encounters, some town history and a live investigation.
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For many years the Franklin County Historical Society did a ghost tour, but this year decided to go a different route with an indoor Murder & Mayhem event. Williams said his paranormal group stepped in to fill the void, though their event will differ from the historical society’s.
Ghost sightings are, of course, not guaranteed. Nothing on the walk is staged, Williams said.
“It’s all live, it’s all real,” he said.
Though TV ghost-chasing shows would have viewers believe that every outing will lead to a ghost sighting within the duration of an episode, Williams said that’s not the case. The ghost walk will give a more authentic view of a paranormal investigation, he said.
Williams has a variety of equipment he uses to help him identify an anomaly. He uses a Mel Meter, which measures the electromagnetic field or cloud, in addition to temperature. A reading between 0.02 and 0.06 milligauss indicates possible paranormal activity, Williams said. He also brings along a modified GoPro clone, a full spectrum light and a studio-quality recorder.
Donahue hopes the ghost walks might attract some people who believe they have some kind of anomaly in their home and want the group to come and investigate. The group usually scouts for sites to investigate themselves. Williams said they keep it local, investigating in the Southwest Virginia area for the most part. He’s investigated courthouses and the homes of Civil War generals.
Not everyone is understanding of the passion investigators have for the paranormal. Often, Williams said, when he tells people about his hobby, they immediately think of devil worship. And while there are certainly some evil spirits out there, he said, his group tries to deal only with entities with positive energy.
He said they look for intelligent hauntings, residual hauntings, poltergeists and shadow figures.
In an intelligent haunting, the ghost will try to interact or communicate with people. A residual haunting is when an event, often traumatic, is essentially replayed where it first took place.
Most people take an interest in the paranormal for a reason, often because they’ve had experiences and encounters of their own.
“We didn’t get into this just by watching TV shows,” Williams said.
Though Williams’ wife has always been able to easily detect paranormal activity — he jokingly refers to her as his ghost bait — he was skeptical until he had a few experiences of his own that he “couldn’t really blow off.”
When the couple lived in a home in Greene County, people would often compliment the curtains in the window. Except, Williams said, there were no curtains. He believes what they thought were curtains was actually a ghost — more specifically, the mother of the home’s owner, waiting for her husband to come home from work.
Donahue established a connection to the paranormal at a young age. As a little girl, she used to have vivid, detailed visions of a bedroom. When Donahue described it to her mother, she learned that it was a perfect match for her mother’s childhood bedroom. But she’d never seen it before.
“Luckily I had a mom that understood and didn’t call me crazy or anything like that,” she said.
Several years ago, Donahue discovered a ghost in her own daughter’s bedroom in a home they were renting in Tennessee. This spirit had a negative energy. It would talk to her daughter when she was sleeping and play with her toys.
After an incident where her daughter woke up screaming, Donahue decided something had to be done about it. She called a friend in a paranormal group who brought along a psychic and they helped the spirit cross over to the other side. After that, Donahue said, things calmed down.
Some people will say that such experiences are all in a person’s head or simply imagined, Williams said. But he doesn’t believe that.
He and others in the group have stories about being pushed or touched by a ghost. He wonders how nonbelievers would explain that.
Donahue says she understands why some people might not believe their paranormal experiences and findings.
“Everybody’s a skeptic about some things,” she said.
People tend to believe in what they know, so if a person has never had any kind of paranormal experience, Donahue said, it’s not surprising that they would be incredulous.
But with a convincing encounter, that can change. After all, Williams started out as a skeptic.
